Fink, Robert. 2005. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal 
Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: 
University of California Press. 

Reviewed by Rob Haskins 

The music of the American minimalist composers-above all, Steve Reich 
and Philip Glass-continues to excite an increasingly diverse, international 
public. DJs have hammered out artful and groovy remixes; online mavens 
have banded together in chat groups; and the advertising industry has 
licensed Glass's music and commissioned Reich knock-offs as parts of cam­
paigns for cars, cereal, soft drinks, and many other products. The composers 
have found success in more conventional venues as well. Last fall, Reich won 
the Edward MacDowell Medal, while Glass saw the premieres of his eighth 
symphony and his twenty-first opera. 

This unusual assortment of venues and events connected with mini­
mal music makes it-perhaps more than any other twentieth- or twenty­
first-century Western classical repertoire-admirably suited to a sustained 
examination of its wider cultural contexts. For the most part, however, 
few have ever attempted such a study. Most scholarly works on minimal­
ism resolutely privilege its formalism and have used sophisticated music­
analytical tools to explicate the music's structure (among many fine 
examples, see Cohn 1993); only recently have scholars undertaken broader, 
culturally grounded inquiries (Grimshaw 2002). 

Thus, Robert Fink's Repeating Ourselves, a major work of such cultural 
criticism, is long overdue. Fink, an associate professor of music at UCLA, 
has a lively mind that has led his teaching and scholarship in a variety of 
directions, from the dizzying array of genres (and subgenres) of electronic 
dance music to Freudian readings of Brahms and Schoenberg. In all his work, 
he profitably reads music against the grain to disclose unexpected cultural 
connections and resonances; his best work discusses popular and classical 
musics in such a way that he honors both without reinscribing traditional 
(and sometimes problematic) methods of determining their value. 

Fink situates American (and some European) minimal music in anum­
ber of concurrent cultural activities. In chapter I, "Do It ('til You're Satis­
fied): Repetitive Musics and Recombinant Desires;' he counterpoises Reich's 
Music for Eighteen Musicians with Donna Summer's "Love to Love You, 
Baby" (both from 1976) to explore the multivalent and erotically charged 
teleology of minimalism and disco. Chapter 2, "'A Colorful Installment in 
the Twentieth-Century Drama of Consumer Subjectivity': Minimalism and 

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the Phenomenology of Consumer Desire;' examines the culture of repeti­
tive advertising in the 1960s, theorizes it (with the help of Jean Baudrillard's 
ideas of postmodernity), and briefly considers how several compositions by 
Reich and Glass might be heard to echo it. Fink continues this inquiry in 
chapter 3, "The Media Sublime: Minimalism, Advertising, and Television;' 
with more sustained analyses of Reich's Eight Lines (1979), Terry Riley's In 
C (1964), Louis Andriessen's Hoketus (1977), and "The Grid," from Glass's 
score for Godfrey Reggio's film Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Chapter 4, '''A Pox on 
Manfredini'; The Long-Playing Record, the Baroque Revival, and the Birth 
of Ambient Music," considers the repetitive, mood-regulating therapy of­
fered by automatic record changers loaded up with mediocre performances 
of Vivaldi, Telemann, and other composers of Baroque Tafelmusik. Finally, 
Fink turns to the intersections of minimalism and Suzuki violin instruction 
in America in chapter 5, '''I Did This Exercise 100,000 Times': Zen, Mini­
malism, and the Suzuki Method;' and ultimately concludes that repetitive 
musical and social activities facilitated the minimalist process-works of the 
mid- and later 1960s. 

The brilliant central chapters 3 and 4 provide the finest examples of 
Fink's talent for interdisciplinary scholarship. His central thesis in chapter 
3 asserts that minimal music "arises with and mirrors a key historical trans­
formation of the consumer society: the self-conscious postwar transfer of 
the repetitive structures of mass production from the material realm of the 
object into the symbolic realm of discourse ... the mass production of desire 
for goods through discourse" (81-82; original emphasis). This desire, Fink 
tells us by way of Baudrillard, is wholly inauthentic, and the need we think 
we perceive for specific objects is actually a need to create social meaning, 
which can never be fulfilled (97). The system of mass production and mass 
advertising creates a discourse in which consumption is no more than an act 
of signification-and the constant proliferation of signs within the discourse 
ensures that consumers will be forever lost in a hall of mirrors, consuming 
without ever feeling satisfied. 

Minimalism reflects this feeling not merely through its use of repeti­
tion as a surface compositional device, but more deeply in its ambiguous 
interpenetration of slow metamorphosis-or even slower rhythmic strata 
(as in many of Reich's works)-and sparkling, kinetic surface activity. In a 
dazzling passage, Fink calls attention to the resonance that this characteristic 
of minimal music shares with the experience of two principal characters in 
Georges Perec's novel Les Choses (1965), characters so obsessed with objects 
and the act of consumption that they experience, as Perec writes, '''a pleasure 
so intense as to verge on numbness: an impression, almost exactly opposite and 
almost exactly identical to the experience of speed'" (101; original emphasis). 



Rob Haskins 

Fink uses this image as a complement to his analysis of Reich's Music for Mal­
let Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973). In this work, a two-chord harmonic 
progression in the voices and organ slowly and systematically appears in 
longer rhythmic values as the faster-moving percussion parts grow in­
creasingly dense. At a certain point, the rhythmic values of the harmonic 
progression gradually return to their original durations. Eventually, Reich 
repeats this design twice more, with different progressions and (in one in­
stance) a different meter. In the final section of the work, a fourth progression 
appears; this time, however, the augmentation of rhythmic values results 
in longer note values than in any other section of the piece, and is not fol­
lowed by a complementary diminution process. In Fink's words, this section 
functions "as if a potentially infinite process of doubling and redoubling had 
simply broken off at the limits of human endurance" (114). 

Something in this characterization represents the experience as emptied 
of expressive content, much in the same way that the principal characters 
of Les Chases are never authentically satisfied by the objects of their con­
sumption. This impression is most plausible, of course, when one considers 
the rhythmic processes alone. But certainly the affective experience of the 
music rests on more than its rhythmic processes. What of the choices Reich 
makes for the pitch and harmonic content of the work's four sections? In 
the case of Music for Mallets, the progressions of the first three sections all 
follow a similar pattern: the second chord of each progression is a minor 
triad preceded by a major chord a minor third higher. This gives the music 
a somber, serious affect, which is made more poignant since the pattern 
occurs throughout the first three sections of the work. In the final section, 
however, the progression is completely different, culminating on a flat domi­
nant seventh chord-a dominant for a major chord that never appears. The 
chord's unexpected appearance, and its concurrent projection in continu­
ously augmented rhythmic values, suggests a subtle expressive strategy in 
the music more nuanced than the rather bleak and hopeless evocation of 
postmodern subjectivity that Fink offers in his reading. 

I can imagine an important reason for Fink's neglect of such details, 
however. Just as certain modes of formalist musical analysis too often 
privilege the content of a musical score without an adequate account of its 
surrounding cultural context, a comprehensive reading of multiple aspects of 
a musical composition might foreclose the experiences of different kinds of 
musical audiences. I believe Fink means to describe the listening experience 
of the (largely) untrained musical audience-such people listen to music in 
their daily lives but do not experience musical details as carefully as might a 
classical musician, a DJ, a critic, a record producer, or many other pro­
fessionals who work with music regularly. Fink's acknowledgement of this 

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audience deserves the highest respect I can give, especially since it allows 
wider access to music scholarship than is often the case. 

Of course, Fink also speaks to more traditional audiences of music 
scholarship. He deals helpfully with details of harmony in several passages 
of the book, for instance. A discussion of a descending long-range linear 
bass pattern in Reich's Music for Eighteen Musicians explains the dramatic 
shift of tonality (to F# Minor) that occurs midway through the work and 
thus elucidates the special kind of teleology that occurs in minimal music 
(52-55). But for him this shift is something rather momentary, like the ef­
fect DJ Frankie Knuckles produces by suddenly turning off the lights and 
playing a recording of a train for drugged-out and otherwise altered revelers 
struggling toward their final ecstatic moments after a night-long adventure 
on the dance floor (41). For me, however, the expressive impact of that sud­
den turn to F# Minor only continues to deepen as Reich extends this tonality 
in successive sections of diverse instrumentation and figuration and as he 
works his way back to the D Major/B Minor tonality with which the piece 
began. The effect is not unlike the subtle changes of beat patterns, tempos, 
and timbres that contribute to the "build" in extended mixes of electronic 
dance music. I would argue that the most discerning enthusiasts for this 
music could savor the long-range planning in Reich's work as welL 

Perhaps the most effective analysis-and by far the most entertain­
ing-is the one Fink supplies for Andriessen's Hoketus (153-57). Drawing 
on advertising theory, Fink describes television as a "low-involvement" 
medium that blandly prepares consumers (in a future purchase situation) 
to apprehend a sudden rush of desire for the product they had previously 
seen hawked ad infinitum in intermittent television ads-ads to which they 
had paid hardly any attention. For Fink, the process is similar to the sudden 
wrenching shifts of tonality and texture that occur in Hoketus. 

Aspects of this reading resonate strongly with my own experience of 
the work, and, like Fink, I can savor his analysis without losing any of my 
great admiration for Hoketus itself. Still, I suspect there is some difference 
between the way I hear the piece and the way Fink does. He insists that the 
architects of repetitive television advertising assume viewers will remain 
largely unaware of individual iterations of the ads, which suggests that his 
claim for minimal music's complicity in the same Zeitgeist similarly assumes 
that most listeners will not-cannot-attend to the repetitive content of the 
music. Fink occasionally makes explicit this corollary assumption in the 
book, as for example in this description of the sensibility underlying the 
rise oflight Baroque and minimalist music in the 1960s: 

The most characteristic venue for Vivaldi was not the party where he was 
ignored, but the study or office, where he was indeed listened to, but in 



Rob Haskins 

a new way. Barococo minimalism is music not for pleasure (Eros), but 
music for mental discipline, for mood regulation ... The repetitive listen­
ing habits of the barococo revival were early harbingers of the way most 
music is consumed now, which in turn is a constituent of the way most 
people are now . 

. . . Minimalism pioneered the deliberate creation of this kind of 
musical ambience in the 1960s, but it was not the first music to address 
itself successfully to the ubiquitous subject-in other words, like television, 
to influence everyone and be fully attended to by no one. (12-13) 

I will readily admit that some listeners do not pay the kind of close 
attention to minimalism that various other musical professionals might. 
I will even grant that some of my musician colleagues are unlikely to pay 
this music the kind of close attention that I do. But Fink seems to deny that 
close attention is truly possible, which is why he hopes we will find a way to 
extricate ourselves from the emptiness of repetitive culture: 

If Mozart speaks only in the language of power to [Christopher] Small, 
perhaps we would be better off listening to Shinichi Suzuki, who heard in 
the Clarinet Quintet, K. 581, a musical expression of profound equality 
within "the great soul of Buddhism." If in the West, Mozart and Vivaldi 
have been trapped in repetition, perhaps only the Zen-like repetition of 
Saino-Kyoiku can set them free. 

We repeated ourselves into this culture. 

We may-nurtured through love-be able to repeat ourselves out. (235) 

Concomitantly, Fink suggests that when close attention is attempted at all, it 
necessarily consigns a consideration of minimalist music to an arid, formal­
ist wasteland that segregates it from wider, more traditionally humanistic 
domains: 

Some music theorists began to realize in the 1980s that this music in fact 
resonated perfectly with the extreme formalism in musical analysis that 
held sway within their discipline ... in each case the analytical methodo­
logies that had served to parse Schubert and Schoenberg [were] tweaked 
somewhat so as to pay attention less to harmonic stasis and more to 
rhythmic complexities. (18)1 

The only other responses to minimalism that Fink acknowledges are those 
of insiders who, echoing Susan Sontag's famous dictum against interpre­
tation, simply describe the music (17) or of those who see the music as a 
revivifying transferal of Eastern philosophies and cultures "into a dying 

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Eurocentric musical discourse" (13). I would like to believe in the existence 
of another community of listeners, one who listens carefully to minimalism 
and responds thoughtfully and proactively to it. 

As a modest example, I offer the following supplement to the discussion 
of Glass's "The Grid" in chapter 3 (161-66). This music accompanies the 
climactic sequence in Godfrey Reggio's film Koyaanisqatsi that shows various 
aspects of urban life-traffic patterns, people entering and leaving subways, 
conveyor belts bearing Twinkies and hot dogs, and more-usually at diz­
zyingly fast speeds. Fink characterizes the relentless assault of images and 
the progressively faster rhythmic values in Glass's rapid music as a careful 
preparation for a shot in which a woman and her children watch a televi­
sion set in the middle of a sales floor surrounded by other television sets. 
In the next scene, we see an onslaught of quickly alternating images from 
television programs and commercials: 

In this culminating moment the overall trajectory of the film becomes 
clear. Monumental scenes of unspoiled nature have given way over the 
course of an hour to machines and industry that rip at the land; then to a 
completely man-made landscape of repetitive production and consump­
tion; and, finally, to the utter alienation of televisual flow washing over us 
at the speed of media. (162-63) 

But we have heard other variations of "The Grid" music in previous scenes 
of the film: in the majestic evocation of unspoiled nature in "Cloudscapes;' 
and in "Vessels," where the first human beings in the film-along with the 
audience-contemplate some monumental edifices of the modern world in­
cluding skyscrapers and jet planes. Both these scenes include clear statements 
of a three-chord harmonic progression that also figures prominently in "The 
Grid." In "Cloudscapes;' Reggio portrays clouds and waterfalls untouched 
by man, so that the music originally accompanying unspoiled nature later 
recurs with images that (for Fink) suggest only a one-dimensional rejection 
of life mediated by technology and industry. At the very least, these three 
instances of related music problematize the more straightforward indictment 
of technology that one might apprehend from Reggio's imagery alone. The 
scoring might also offer a way to view technology and mechanized society 
as cultural sites that can engender both concern and celebration, an inter­
pretive stance that seems more in line with a quotation Fink cites of Glass 
describing the "vitality, and a sense of beauty" that the composer sees in the 
hyperactive city imagery (164-65). 

Fink's cultural reading of minimalist music also suggests how important 
it is to consider the larger aesthetic fabric and sociocultural dimensions of 
twentieth-century music after 1950. Minimal music forms only one thread 



Rob Haskins 

in this fabric, of course, and the compositional choices of Glass, Reich, and 
others respond both musically and culturally to other composers of their 
time as surely as they do to the repetitive culture that Fink considers. The 
very different responses of John Cage and Reich to the idea of process, for 
example, extend the model of Fink's repetitive culture in other valuable direc­
tions. Reich's sustained critique of Cage in the well-known essay "Music as a 
Gradual Process" (2002:34-36) points out Cage's reliance on compositional 
processes that cannot be heard as such. But Reich fails to see that Cage's 
interest in a music emphasizing the process of life actually offers listeners 
a myriad of possible interpretive stances of equal validity. Put another way, 
Cage's music does not alienate listeners searching for meaning so much as it 
creates a space in which they can find their own particular meanings. And in 
the 1960s, as evidenced by his computerization of the I Ching with the help 
of Lejaren Hiller, Cage thought of computers and similar process-oriented 
technologies as tools of artistic creation used by many people working in 
concert, and thus as models of societal cooperation without hierarchies (see 
Cage 1973:22-24). A broader look at such ideas about technology and its 
cultural reception would help contextualize Reich and Cage alike. 

No book is free of errors. I will mention two particularly unfortunate 
ones involving musical examples since they might mislead readers who have 
not seen these scores. First, the final vocal/organ chord in example 10 (115) 
should read A~-E~-O-Ek In example 18 (232), I believe Fink wants to cite 
Glass's Strung Out (1967) as an example of an ultra-repetitive violin piece 
that Shinichi Suzuki would not enjoy playing. Instead, he quotes a kind of 
impromptu realization of Glass's ensemble piece Two Pages (1968). Strung 
Out, a work far less repetitive than Two Pages, might well have appealed to 
the famed pedagogue as an interesting exercise.2 

These lapses should not deter readers of various backgrounds and 
viewpoints to read and re-read (and re-read) Repeating Ourselves and to 
enjoy it as a thoroughly researched, vastly entertaining, and often surprising 
tour de force of musicology and cultural studies. I believe the book provides 
an important example of how we might read a musical repertoire and its 
various realizations in larger socio-historical contexts. I hope it stimulates 
further work that addresses other audiences for and experiences of minimal 
music, as well as scholarship that considers other twentieth-century concert 
music with respect to its wider socio-cultural aspects. 

Notes 

1. Of course, it is possible for sustained music-analytic scholarship to elucidate twentieth­
century music in more traditionally humanistic domains. As an example, see Arnold Whittall's 
discussion of Elliott Carter's Syringa (2003:153-57). 

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2. For score excerpts of both works, see Potter (2000:278) (Strung Out) and (2000:289) (Two 
Pages). 

References 

Cage, John. 1973. M: Writings '67-'72. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 
Cohn, Richard. 1993. Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve Reich's Phase­

Shifting Music. Perspectives of New Music 31 (2): 146-77. 
Grimshaw, Jeremy N. 2002. High, "Low;' and Plastic Arts: Philip Glass and the Symphony in 

the Age of Postproduction. Musical Quarterly 86: 472-507. 
Potter, Keith. 2000. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip 

Glass. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 
Reich, Steve. 2002. Music as a Gradual Process. In Writings About Music, 1965-2004, edited 

and with an introduction by Paul Hillier, 34-36. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univer­
sity Press. 

Whittall, Arnold. 2003. Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation. Cam­
bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 


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